When the dust finally settled on Wall Street, my Dividend Farm dipped $266.88 (4.13%) – worse than the major indices – as the DOW was down 2.83%, the NASDAQ sank 3.04% and the S&P 500 fell 2.48%.

The good news, though, is I did earn a few dividends. Nothing like a combined $1.33 in dividend income to make up for a $266 hit, right? Ha.

Today’s Dividends

Apple may go even lower in the near future. Then again, it may go higher. Same thing for the rest of the stocks I own. It’s what they do. Good thing I’m not investing for the near future. I’m playing the long game … and to succeed long-term means making consistent strides no matter what the market is doing.

That said, I did just that today. By automatically investing the combined $1.33 in dividend income I earned from three different companies, my estimated annual income inched higher, up a whopping $0.02 today. Two cents might not seem like much, but it’s progress. It’s a raise that I didn’t have to do anything for … and those raises are only going to get bigger as I add more and more shares to my portfolio over time.

For those of you keeping score at home, I received $0.46 from Allstate (ALL), which turned into another 0.00564 shares when reinvested; $0.65 from FedEx, which purchased another 0.041 shares of the company; and $0.22 from Nike (NKE), which translated to another 0.00301 shares. They were my first dividends of the new year.